Marketers are overwhelmed. What is the root cause?

CEO

Every day, I talk to Marketing VPs, Directors, and CEOs about their business goals and marketing strategies and 9 out of 10 times, I see the same body language – nodding heads, eye-rolls, and several deep breaths. It’s that feeling of complete exasperation and feeling overwhelmed by everything they’ve heard in the media and at conferences about needing to do it all in digital marketing – post on Facebook, tweet, maintain your Youtube channel, SEO, PPC, get your email marketing program dialed and your newsletter out on at least a monthly basis, regularly blog, get fresh content live on your website, and then there are the NEW NEW things that you should be all over like Pinterest, Foursquare, Google+, and an ever-increasing number of social sites and channels to monitor. As a human race, we are promoting Attention Deficit Disorder in the worst way. And, as digital marketers, we feel compelled to crank up our Attention Deficit Disorder on massive steroids. It all seems so out of control.

At eROI, we recently launched our 2012 Digital Marketing Strategies & Trends survey to find out the root cause of exactly why marketers are feeling so overwhelmed. I know this is a crazy thought, but as marketers, we do have a choice. We can choose to evaluate which of all of these digital marketing channels work for us (that drive meaningful Return on Investment) and first focus on those 1 or 2 marketing channels before adding more to your plate. To many marketers, these dozens of choices of where to spend our time, energy, and budget leads to paralysis and everything gets watered down and is left ineffective.

Let’s use nature as a metaphor for this conundrum that so many marketers are finding themselves in. We need to step back and figure out what animal species our company is like. Is your company like a spider that lays thousands of eggs in the hopes that a few dozen thrive or is it more like an elephant who has one or two (twins) offspring at a time to nurture over a long lifespan.